Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often provide their residential customers with fairly sophisticated customer-premises equipment (such as a home router) that facilitates access to the Internet and/or virtual services. Unfortunately, such customer-premises equipment may suffer from certain shortcomings and/or inefficiencies that have a negative impact on customer experience. For example, conventional customer-premises equipment may be relatively expensive. As a result, such customer-premises equipment may place a heavy financial burden on ISPs, which in turn pass on the expense to their customers.
Additionally or alternatively, conventional customer-premises equipment may be relatively complex and/or user-unfriendly. As a result, unsophisticated customers may be unable to configure such customer-premises equipment without professional assistance. Moreover, conventional customer-premises equipment may need periodic software and/or hardware upgrades to support new virtual services offered by the ISPs. As a result, the ISPs may need to periodically coordinate large-scale software and/or hardware rollouts that reach the majority of their customer bases.
The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for systems and methods for virtualizing customer-premises equipment at ISP networks.